Supply Chain is Boring

Supply Chain is Boring runs on a deadpan premise. Its host, Chris, calls himself the Supply Chain Doctor, has declared his own field boring, and signs off with the same verdict: supply chain is boring. Then he sets about gathering evidence against himself. Introducing Bruce Welty, he admits the whole thing sounds pretty boring and says he wants to see whether Welty can prove him wrong. Underneath the joke is a sincere oral history of logistics and supply chain management. A recurring introduction explains how the project grew by referral: Chris sat down with Ken Ackerman in May 2020 to collect some of the field's history, Ackerman told him about a similar interview with Dr. James Stock from years before, and Chris caught up with Stock that November. The questions lean biographical, and they start early. In the three-part conversation with Dr. James L. Heskett, the talk reaches back to pitching hay in 100-degree heat, nauseating flights with a father who was an amateur pilot, and a one-room schoolhouse where eight grades shared a room and the smallest children sat nearest the wood stove. Heskett still remembers that teacher by name, Sarah Schreiber. Elsewhere in the series he describes a thesis called industrial logistics, with a diagram of inbound and outbound processes, and the view that distribution was only one side of the coin. In the third part he talks about community life in and around Boston and offers a plain lesson from more than four decades in academia: be yourself, because if you wait for others to define your career you can wait a long time. The conversation with the late Don Bowersox approaches the field from a different angle. It includes memories of joining the Railway Express Agency in New York in the fall of 1960 while finishing a dissertation, and of a book that was hard to publish because, in so obscure a field, no one knew what it was. There is also a pointed passage on academic incentives: an unsuccessful push, as dean, for a professorship for great teachers, and criticism of research that passes statistical tests without generating new knowledge. Bruce Welty represents the industry side. Chris heard about him through Boston-area colleagues who worked for Kiva, and calls him, from what he can tell, the Steve Jobs of warehouse robotics. Welty's story starts in Minneapolis, with a father in supply chain at Honeywell and a grandfather who was a postal worker, before a reluctant move to Massachusetts at 15. The show is part of the Supply Chain Now Network. What a listener gets is portraiture: the people behind the textbooks, in their own words, with the running joke as the frame.